She heard Geertje’s tones mimicking her mincingly, “You know what you promised your mother and father.” Then a cascade of smothered giggles.
Pervus had been to town, evidently, for he now took from his coat pocket a bag containing half a dozen bananas—that delicacy of delicacies to the farm palate. She half peeled two and brought them in to the pigtails. They ate them thickly rapturous, and dropped off to sleep immediately, surfeited.
Pervus DeJong and Selina sat at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them on the oilcloth. The sweet heavy scent of the fruit filled the room. Selina brought the parlour lamp into the kitchen, the better to see. It was a nickel-bellied lamp with a yellow glass shade that cast a mellow golden glow.
“You didn’t go to the meeting,” primly. “Mr. and Mrs. Pool went.”
“No. No, I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
She saw him swallow. “I got through too late. I went to town, and I got through too late. We’re fixing to sow tomato seeds in the hotbeds to-morrow.”
Selina opened McBride’s Grammar. “Ahem!” a school-teacherly cough. “Now, then, we’ll parse this sentence: Blucher arrived on the field of Waterloo just as Wellington was receiving the last onslaught of Napoleon. ‘Just’ may be treated as a modifier of the dependent clause. That is: ‘Just’ means: at the time at which. Well. Just here modified at the time. And Wellington is the . . .”
This for half an hour. Selina kept her eyes resolutely on the book. His voice went on with the dry business of parsing and its deep resonance struck a response from her as a harp responds when a hand is swept over its strings. Upstairs she could hear old Jakob clumping about in his preparations for bed. Then there was only stillness overhead. Selina kept her eyes resolutely on the book. Yet she saw, as though her eyes rested on them, his large, strong hands. On the backs of them was a fine golden down that deepened at his wrists. Heavier and darker at the wrists. She found herself praying a little for strength—for strength against this horror and wickedness. This sin, this abomination that held her. A terrible, stark, and pitiful prayer, couched in the idiom of the Bible.
“Oh, God, keep my eyes and my thoughts away from him. Away from his hands. Let me keep my eyes and my thoughts away from the golden hairs on his wrists. Let me not think of his wrists. . . . The owner of the southwest ¼ sells a strip 20 rods wide along the south side of his farm. How much does he receive at $150 per acre?”